ICS Seminar Series - Zelmarie Cantillon

Date: Thursday, 26 March 2020
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: This seminar will take place ONLINE via Zoom. Please join via the following link: https://uws.zoom.us/j/324554331

A Cultural Justice Approach to Heritage: Preservation, Storytelling and Activism in Community-Based Heritage Initiatives

Presenter:Dr Zelmarie Cantillon

Discussant: Dr Hayley Saul

Abstract

Considerations of social justice are increasingly common in critical heritage studies. There is a dearth of research, however, that engages with the concept of cultural justice in relation to heritage. According to Ross (1998, 2), cultural justice refers to ‘doing justice to culture, pursuing justice through cultural means, and seeking justice for cultural claims’. Much like social justice, cultural justice is concerned with issues of power and inequalities, but is specifically attentive to the cultural fabric of communities – to cultural forms, expressions, narratives and institutions. This paper explores the conceptual contours of cultural justice and how it can be used as a lens through which to analyse heritage. Using the case study of community-based heritage initiatives focused on popular music’s past in three deindustrialising cities – Wollongong, Australia; Birmingham, UK; and Detroit, USA – the paper considers how cultural justice manifests in relation to heritage practices. Drawing on Banerjee and Steinberg’s (2015) work on the role of cultural narratives in environmental justice movements, the paper discusses how cultural justice outcomes can be sought through preservation, storytelling and community mobilisation.

Biography

Zelmarie Cantillon is a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Her research focuses on the intersections between spatiality, heritage, cultural policy and tourism. She is author of Resort Spatiality: Reimagining Sites of Mass Tourism (Routledge, 2019) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History (Routledge, 2018) and Remembering Popular Music’s Past: Memory–Heritage–History (Anthem Press, 2019).

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The Institute for Culture and Society is located in Parramatta, “the place where the eel sets down” in Dharug language,
along the north bank of the Parramatta River. It sits on the traditional lands and waters of the Burramattagal people of the Dharug Nation,
who have been stewards and caretakers of these territories since time immemorial, in what today is referred to as Greater Western Sydney,
one of the most diverse cultural communities in the world and home to the largest number of Indigenous Australians in the country.
The Institute for Culture and Society acknowledges the Dharug, Eora, Dharawal (also referred to as Tharawal)
and Wiradjuri peoples as traditional custodians and Indigenous knowledge-holders, whose storytelling serve
as historical record, a form of teaching and learning, a way to care for Country,
and an expression of Indigenous culture and identity.